The present invention relates generally to computer storage and in particular to identifying information about those elements which constitute a storage area network.
Knowledge is an important competitive advantage for any business. The drive to develop knowledge stores and improve storage hardware capacity leads to explosive growth in storage and computing resources. As a consequence of businesses depending increasingly on applications and their underlying data, continuous, reliable, and rapid access to data becomes critical. It is important to be able to guarantee online access and quick restores of lost data. Mass storage systems are becoming increasingly complex as developments in storage technology continue to meet the demands of the market.
A natural evolutionary trend in the provision and management of mass storage systems has been the development of storage area networks (SANs). SAN is a storage architecture which provides high capacity storage capability that is accessed reliably and transparently by users. The architecture virtualizes physical disks into a large consolidated pool and then presents the individual users (web servers, enterprise servers, PC users, an so on) with virtual disks from the pool.
SAN architectures typically comprise a collection of various storage technologies, each having different capabilities optimized for specific situations; e.g., individual disks, arrays such as RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) and JBOD (just a bunch of disks), tape drives, and so on. Fibre channel switches are typically used to connect computer users (servers, PC users, etc.) to the storage devices.
Allocating storage for an application, such as a database running on a server, is a complex and error-prone process. Usually, it requires the system administrator to know the details of what storage device(s) would be the right match for the particular application. Obtaining knowledge about such details as throughput, access time, multi-path policy, reliability, and availability is a process which invariably relies on the individual expertise of one person or another.
In addition, business organizations sharing a single large SAN typically use a fibre channel switches' port zoning capability to zone off, or hide, one organizations devices from another organizations devices. Zoning is done a switch at a time. This becomes complex as switch after switch is added to the SAN.